Read Online Blood Game: A Jock Boucher Thriller by David Lyons - Free Book Online

Rosario standing before him, arms outstretched, bathed in blue light. Gone was her smile, the dark eyes. Gone was her head above the jawline, the bottom row of teeth visible over a lower lip curled in a grotesque grimace. The body began to fall. Before it could land, Javier was running from the room, up the stairs, through the kitchen, across the backyard, flinging himself at the wall at the rear of the property, clawing his way to the top, then over. Dropping to soft ground and running, running, knowing that he would be running till the end of his days from the ghost of the woman he had murdered, a spirit that would haunt him till he drew his final breath.

CHAPTER 6
    L IGHTS WERE ON LATE in the Dumont home that night. The kitchen light was on when they got home, and Ray could feel air circulating from the open back door as soon as he entered the front.
    “Stay here,” he ordered his wife. “Rosario?” he called out. “¿Dónde estás?  ” In the connecting hallway, the door to the basement was open. Rosario never would have gone down there at night. But before checking it out, he peered into the kitchen. The remains of a meal were on the table, as well as a bottle of his tequila, well sampled, which meant he’d have to fire her. Damn. He needed to check out the basement but first went to a large locked cherrywood cabinet in the dining room. He kept a key to this piece of furniture on his key ring; he fished it out of his pocket and opened it. From a drawer he took a small pistol.
    “What are you doing, Ray?” Elise called to him.
    “Just stay there,” he said.
    Dumont descended the stairs. The basement was dim with the ambient illumination coming from below. He held the pistol before him like a flashlight. He ignored the wine cellar; the blue glow from the man cave that held his gun collection beckoned. He approached.
    “Aw, goddammit,” he said when he saw the body. He heard noise at the top of the stairs. “Elise, don’t come down here. I mean it. Don’t come down.”
    •  •  •
    Lights were on late in the Logan home that night. Walt Logan was chief of the New Orleans Police Department. Logan valued influential friends. Ray Dumont was one of them.
    Lights were also on late in the home of Detective Fitch. He growled at the late-night call from Chief Logan.
    “Sorry to bother you this late, Roscoe,” the chief said.
    Roscoe? Logan hadn’t called him by his first name in the over twenty years they had worked together. If they had shared anything more than an arm’s-length working relationship, Logan would have known that Fitch hated the name.
    “What is it, Chief?”
    “Ray Dumont and his wife returned home from an evening with the governor to find their maid in the basement with her head blown off. She might have known thekiller. No sign of B and E. I need you to get over there. I don’t want the Dumonts embarrassed by this, uh, situation. Understand what I’m saying?”
    “Right. I’m on my way. The big house on Saint Charles Avenue, right?”
    “Yeah. Come see me in my office when you get in tomorrow morning.”
    “Will do.”
    Embarrassed? Why would they be embarrassed by the death of a domestic? Fitch asked himself. They could not have had a better alibi than an evening with the governor. Well, he thought as he dressed, a rich man’s home is a labyrinth of secrets. He knew he was being called out on a cleanup detail. Ray Dumont was waiting at the door, having heard Fitch’s car arrive. Introductions were curt.
    “This way, Detective. The body is in the cellar.”
    Fitch followed him down the stairs. Basements were rare in older New Orleans homes for the same reason that graves in cemeteries were elevated—another reminder that much of the city was below sea level. He followed Dumont into the room of blue light. The body was on the floor, untouched. The loss of blood was massive and filled the floor of much of the room, a reflective black pool.
    “You step in here?” Fitch